A very easy, fashionable and timely meme this week:
What’s your favourite Doctor Who costume and why?
Initially, start with the Doctor’s outfit, but if you want you can also comment on the companions’ outfits, too. I imagine that Zoe’s, Peri’s, Leela’s and even Karen Gillan’s will get a look in there, but each to his or her own. My faves: early Pertwee ruffles/Tennant brown suit + anything Peri wore. Just anything. You?
As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog.
Three episodes into Hung and it’s turning out that the everyday story of a guy with a big dick who turns to prostitution to make ends meet (ho ho) isn’t about as much as I thought it was about. At first glance, it looked like it was a caustic look at gender relations.
But now, I’m not so sure. It seems more like Dmitry Lipkin’s last show, The Riches, and is merely a cynical look at what happens to not desperately bad people when they’re down on their luck. Here, we have a teacher who would be a male prostitute, and a poet who would be his pimp. Except neither’s very good at it, and they’re both getting shafted (ho ho) by everyone else. Are they supposed to toughen up or find their soft interiors and each other? Does the man need to embrace his femininity to succeed, while the woman embrace her masculinity to triumph?
I’m not even sure the show’s going to attempt to answer that question. Yet, I’m inclined to hang around to find out. It’s well made, relatively engaging, and thankfully short at a half-hour per episode. There’s the occasional touch of Fight Club soul-searching and social satire. And it might just answer those questions it’s raised in the end.
But it needs to get a move on.
Carusometer rating: 2 Rob’s prediction: Will probably make it to the end of the season, and even get renewed. But it needs to find its feet soon or those chances will begin to dwindle.
We are living in a post-The Wire, post-The Shield age. You can’t get much grittier than those two police shows did. Cops are one of the staples of US television, so it’s telling that most cop shows have stopped trying to be gritty since they know they can’t match them. Hence, we have The Mentalist, Numb3rs, The Unusuals et al, whose proximity to gritty is measurable in light years rather than centimetres.
So it’s a brave show that tries to do gritty right now. Then again, what choice does a programme have on TNT – the home of dark, gritty TV that couldn’t quite make it on FX or HBO?
Dark Blue stars that lovely Dylan McDermott – you know, from The Practice and Miracle on 34th Street – as a dark, gritty undercover cop who handles even darker, grittier undercover cops in an off-the-books, top-secret unit way. It’s not a bad attempt at gritty and it’s not without merit, but it’s very hard to believe that this is anywhere close to cinema verité for two reasons.
The first is that it’s a Jerry Bruckheimer production and pretty much follows the standard queues of any police drama, from long-suffering wives to cops who give up everything for the job. The second is that it stars that lovely Dylan McDermott.
Here’s a sneak preview. See if you can avoid laughing at him being dark and brooding.
Our Joanna is currently off in Wales filming the third series of Gavin & Stacey. But a little while ago, I mentioned she was in Dubai, filming Jack Osbourne’s Adrenaline Junkie. Turns out, all that navy fun in Making Waves stood her in good stead for some powerboat racing.
“Joanna couldn’t wait to get in, she was jumping up and down. Reggie didn’t like water but he was really good and just said ‘I’m getting in’. Jack and Jesse went back to the hotel. We thought it was really strange – adrenaline junkie or not?!”
But the next day, the boys decided to go ahead with the race.
Sarah said: “Joanna was buzzing and I think she went back to the hotel and told them how amazing it was. Then they were under pressure because if a girl could do it, then they should be able to do it. It wasn’t very adrenaline junkie. Joanna is a true adrenaline junkie.”
